You won’t find a light and charming tune like “Mushaboom,” “1234” or “I Feel It All” on Pleasure, Feist’s fifth album. Feist distanced herself from those coffee-shop hits on her last record, 2011’s Metals; Pleasure is even more uncompromising. It’s roughhewn and stark, unsettled and earnest, perhaps not unlike a set of demos. It’s fascinating—at times beautiful, at times abrasive. The album is less about the perks of pleasure than the transience of its existence, the pains of its absence and the questions of its worth. The title track opens the album with Feist singing at the bottom of her register and forcefully plucking an electric guitar; anyone who’s seen her in Broken Social Scene knows she’s a mean player, comfortable fronting the BSS guitar army, and here she sounds like she’s wrestling with the instrument. “Pleasure” sounds more like something from PJ Harvey’s Four-Track Demos than from a Starbucks compilation.
Much of the LP is Feist unaccompanied, playing either acoustic or electric, with slight washes of keyboards from her longtime collaborator and co-producer Mocky. A few songs have drums or a gang of backing vocals; saxophonist Colin Stetson helps out on the gentle “The Wind,” and Jarvis Cocker drops in for a theatrical oration in the unhinged “Century.” One can imagine the arrangements fleshed out, but the rawness suits the emotions of songs like “I Wish I Didn’t Miss You,” which cops the melody from Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” and “Get Not High Get Not Low,” which depicts the challenges of living with extremes. Feist’s voice can still be tender and lovely—the slight crack when she gets into her upper range can be devastating—but she’s no longer interested in the simple pleasures of immediate hooks. Instead, we get something more complex, challenging and provocative.
—Steve Klinge
